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Biliteracy Thrives at El Sol Elementary

Sehvilla Mann
/
WMUK

 This is the first in a three-part series about the bilingual experience at El Sol.

Most of the students at El Sol Elementary in Kalamazoo are learning a second language. That’s because the school teaches half of its lessons in English and the other half in Spanish.

The goal is for kids to graduate knowing both. It’s also to show them, as one parent puts it, that “the world is not all English.” And it gives those whose native language is Spanish the chance to study it.

In the first of a three-part series, WMUK reports on how El Sol came to exist six years ago, and what it means to the students and parents it serves.

El Sol is part of Kalamazoo’s public school system. But it buses students in from all over Kalamazoo County. Kindergartners and first graders arrive with every combination of experience in the two languages, from speaking both fluently to knowing only one.

Fifth grader Yesenia mostly spoke Spanish when she came to El Sol as a first grader.

“I only spoke a little bit of English,” she says.

Asked if it was difficult to have to study in English, she adds, “It was pretty hard but I got the hang of it…it’s easy to talk English now since I know it."

Fifth grader Oliver spoke only English.

“On the first day of kindergarten I had no idea remotely what the teachers were saying,” he says. His Spanish skills came "slowly" but steadily.

“Through, like, the middle of first grade I started understanding it pretty well,” he says.

Oliver says he's happy with where his Spanish skills are now.

Principal Heather Grisales greets the students as they arrive in the morning.

Tienes jacketa?” She asks a student just coming in the door. “Hace frio! Buenos días…me gusta tu falda!”

Before El Sol, Kalamazoo Public Schools offered a different dual language program. The Lincoln International Studies School let students opt in or out of a fifty-fifty Spanish-English immersion program. But when the district considered ending it, families spoke out. Grisales says they felt strongly that their children benefited from learning a second language and from the cultural experience created by a diverse group of students.

“And these parents wrote up a proposal and went to the board of education and our superintendent, Dr. Michael Rice, supported it,” Grisales says.

The proposal was for a dedicated bilingual school. The building the district assigned them on Oak and Vine Streets had once housed an alternative high school.

“But it had been closed for 15 years or so. So there was nobody in this building where we are, and it was messy and dirty and dusty and had boxes everywhere,” Grisales says.

They got the building cleaned up, and El Sol opened in the fall of 2008.

The approach has always been to split the students’ time between English and Spanish. But Grisales says that still leaves some questions unanswered. Such as: How often to switch? And which subjects should be taught in each language?

“For the first two to three years, the model was very different than it is now,” she says.

First the school flipped some subjects by week – math, for example, in Spanish for five days, then in English. Then for a while, El Sol switched languages every day. Everything from announcements to lessons happened in English one day and in Spanish the next. But Grisales says the staff found that the daily switch confused students.

Now, instead of switching languages, El Sol students learn all their math and science in Spanish. Grisales says there’s a reason.

“In math and science the root of the language is very similar in English and Spanish, so for example, triángulo and triangle, look very similar and they sound – they don’t sound similar but they look very similar on paper and a science word might be fósil and fossil," she says.

The kids learn social studies in English, and also practice English “language arts.”

El Sol calls the program “biliterate” because the students don’t just learn to speak each language, they learn to read and write it. Teacher Danielle Jn Baptiste says that sometimes a newly arrived kindergartner or first grader does balk at the prospect of learning in a second language.

“They never say the reverse about English, but they say ‘I don’t speak Spanish,’” she says.

She tells them in Spanish that she’s sure they can pick it up.

“And they continue the conversation with me, and they may be responding in English, but they’re responding to me fully understanding what I’m saying and saying well I do know – I understand what you’re saying but I just don’t understand this concept. So I continue to explain to them for example in math, continue to explain it to them in Spanish and they say, ‘oh, now I get it,’” she says.

Eventually, Jn Baptiste says, the reluctant students adjust.

Most of the El Sol students that learn a second language start in the early grades. But a few have to jump in later. One is fourth grader Adrian, who moved to the United States from Spain just a few months ago. His friend Andrea translates – but also helps him to speak in English.

Es un poco difícil,” he says, referring to learning English. “It’s a little bit hard.”

On his own he adds,

“Today is my birthday. The 30 of October.” His friend asks him in Spanish how old he is, and in English he says that he’s 10.

Marta Melero is Adrian’s mom. “He didn’t tell me he had said something in English!” she says of Adrian's conversation on the playground.

Melero speaks English fluently, but has always spoken Spanish with her children.

“It doesn’t come out naturally to talk to your children in a language that is not yours…I it for business for work but I cannot do it. Probably if you [Mann] have a kid, even if you speak Spanish, you wouldn’t speak Spanish to your kid because certain things need to be said in your own language. It’s going to make more sense,” she says.

Melero says she had worried that the language gap would feel discouraging to her children when they moved to Kalamazoo.

“And it wasn’t like that, it was fine. I mean, in the beginning especially, my daughter, she didn’t really want to speak English and she was like no, but everybody speaks Spanish. And I was like yeah, but you are in the US, once you leave El Sol people don’t speak Spanish, not everybody,” she says.

She’s been helping her daughter with her English pronunciation – and it’s coming along.

“Last night we were reading and she read two books, little books of course, very easy, but she read them just like that and it was fine. Only a couple of corrections but for the rest it was perfect, so not bad. Can’t complain,” she says.

Melero says she wants her kids to keep their Spanish. But she does wonder if they’ll get enough exposure to English at El Sol.  

“Sometimes I think, well, maybe they should go to an English school so they will have to struggle with English. But I’m debating that because maybe it’s not going to be such a good idea,” she says.

Melero adds that her kids love El Sol and want to keep going. So she tells them they have to work on their English so they can stay.

Part Two of WMUK’s three-part series on El Sol focuses on what it takes to teach – and to learn – in both Spanish and English.
 

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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